Monday, July 07, 2014

"Hobby Lobby makes clear that all persons -- human and corporate, citizen and foreigner, resident and alien -- enjoy the special religious free exercise protections of" the federal Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, the law at the center of the Hobby Lobby case, the lawyers wrote.

The detainees want to perform additional prayers during the holy month of Ramadan, which began on June 28.

According to Al Jazeera, federal courts have previously ruled that Guantanamo detainees were not "persons within the scope of RFRA" and therefore did not have any guaranteed rights to religious exercise.

Of course, those prisoners aren't persons with rights the same way that an abstract organizational construct like a corporation has. Obviously. Well, an American corporation anyway. (Whatever that is in this age of multi-nationals and global commerce.)

You have to admit that it's fascinating how "rights" are being applied these days. That old coot Tom Jefferson called them inalienable and endowed by our creator, but apparently he forgot to mention that God was an American and He didn't mean those rights to be conferred upon foreigners. He did, however, mean them to be conferred on corporations, apparently.

Where does this corporations-are-people business start and stop? Under the law, corporations and humans have long had different standards of responsibility. If corporations are treated as people, so that they are free to spend money in election campaigns and to invoke their religious beliefs to deny a kind of health coverage to their workers, are they to be treated as people in other regards? Corporations are legal entities whose owners are not personally liable for the company’s debts, whereas actual people are liable for their own. Both people and corporations can discharge their debts through bankruptcy, but there are several kinds of bankruptcy, and the conditions placed on people are generally far more onerous than those placed on corporations. If corporations are people, why aren’t they subject to the same bankruptcy laws that people are? Why aren’t the owners liable for corporate debts as people are for their own?

If corporations are going to be given the freedoms that people enjoy, they should be subjected to people’s obligations and restrictions too. I’m not sure how many corporations would think that’s such a good deal.

The legal justification for corporate personhood seems to be that these entities are made up of individuals and that's whose rights are being upheld. Setting aside the undemocratic nature of all that --- employees' individual rights seem to be exempted from this scheme --- the fact is that corporations are not held to the same standards as individual human beings. In fact, there is a whole different legal structure in place to deal with them in ways that shield the individuals who run them from the laws that cover the rest of us. As it stands, corporations seem to be getting the benefits of individual rights that accrue to people as well as the benefits of corporate law that exempts the individuals who run them from the legal responsibilities everyone else has.

Meanwhile, actual human beings being held by the US Government are being denied the inalienable rights that are guaranteed under the constitution with some embarrassing legal flim-flam that says because they are called "detainees" instead of prisoners of war and are being held offshore in Guantanamo instead of on United States soil they aren't entitled. And corporations are now said to have religious freedom under the first amendment. Why, if one didn't know better one would think that old Bill of Rights isn't taken all that seriously by some very important and powerful people in this country.